What Gran Turismo and Forza can learn from one another

We've had a little more time to play with GT5, and with the release of DLC for …

It has been nearly a month since Gran Turismo 5 brought a marquee-level driving game to the PS3. A lot of the initial reviews voiced frustration at the way the developers, Polyphony Digital, chose to implement certain features. We've all had a bit more time to get used to its various quirks though, so how well do those complaints stand up?

GT5 also hit the Web; now you can log on and check your status, see cars you and your friends have shared, and send each other messages. It's rumored that you'll be able to control B-spec races remotely this way, but we don't have an ETA for when this might happen. This week also saw the release of new DLC for Forza Motorsport 3 with the long-awaited Jalopnik community choice pack. There are also now trailers for that game's successor, Forza Motorsport 4, so I thought I'd ramble a bit about what each current game gets right, what they get wrong, and what I'd like to see in future versions.

Playing GT5 and FM3 back to back in similar cars on the same tracks makes one thing abundantly clear. GT5 is the better looking game. Let's start with the cockpit view. There is an evident attention to detail there: the way that your car will vibrate over bumps, the subtle tint you get from looking out behind a windscreen, even the way little bits of grass or dirt get thrown up when a car in front puts a wheel off the course. It would be nice if I could look around inside the car while driving, something that can be done with the aid of a PlayStation Eye, but even then it's only in Arcade mode, and it's not always flawless.

RPM

GT5 gives you the ability to pick three different in-car views: wide, zoom, and extra zoom. That it does this is good, but in part I think it's to offset a deficiency, one that FM3 shows needn't be there. I'm talking about the heads-up display, also known as all that stuff that's overlayed on top of your screen. GT5 puts this all in a strip at the bottom of the screen. To the left is handy info like tire temperature, damage (if you're playing online) and accelerator and brake pressure.

The problem is on the right side of the screen. This is where it displays your RPMs, and it does it with a bar. Now, there's a reason that, for about as long as we've had motorcars, a tachometer has been a round face with a needle: it works beautifully. In a single glance you can tell where you are in the rev range, and that's quite important for racing. On the Xbox 360 side of things, this information is also displayed on the right side of the screen, but instead of in a bar that's hard to read, it's in a big circle that makes it very easy to see what RPMs you're doing, and what gear you're in.

You might be thinking to yourself, "So what, you're using the in-car view, you can just use that car's tach." Except that you'll often find it's too dark to read it or it's obscured by the rim of the steering wheel. And you get reminded that they know how to do it right when you're using one of the 800 cars that don't have rendered interiors. No, these get the classic GT view: a big round speedo and a big round tach right in the middle of the screen, giving you all the info you need. Polyphony seems to be willing to address deficiencies in the game with patches, so if you're reading this, Kaz, please consider borrowing this approach from your rivals—it would be a definite enhancement.

Actually driving the cars, I think GT5 might be ahead of FM3, but it's by a whisker. It's certainly easier to drive the fastest cars quickly. Using identical cars on the same tracks, I've found I can set faster laptimes in GT5, with Nurburgring times that seem beyond reach in FM3. Whether or not that's realistic, I don't know, but it makes me feel like a racing god, so that's a point to Polyphony.

A lot has already been said on the menu navigation, so I won't continue to labor the point beyond saying that playing the two games back to back shows there really is a right way and a wrong way to implement this, and GT5 does it the wrong way.

Grinding and tuning

Career play in GT5 is another area where I hope Kaz et al. listen to the critics. The game involves an awful lot of grinding. Race series unlock at certain levels, but the cars you need to enter some of them require you to be even more advanced, and even then you're relying on being able to find one for sale in the used car lot, where the stock rotates slowly. Race championships get annoying because, unless you're prepared to sit down and complete all the races in one go, you may as well not enter. In this regard, it's a definite regression, because GT4 let you save in the middle of a race series so you could pick it up after a break.

This grinding would be a lot more enjoyable if online races got you anything more than bragging rights. There's still no leaderboards, and you will earn neither credits nor experience. You also can't race each other on custom tracks, even though you can share them with each other. Fixing that seems like a no-brainer.

There are also a ton of race series in career mode that you'll almost certainly never return to, and tracks that get very little use. Perhaps the answer is to use Arcade mode, but I'm fairly sure that previous iterations of the franchise had championships which would tailor your opponents to the car you select. Arcade mode is fine, but like online play, it gets you nothing in the way of credits or experience, and since grinding is the name of the game, it's not something I'll be using for a while—not if I'm trying to build up my garage.

B-Spec might have been the answer to this, but you're limited in the tires your B-Spec driver can use, which often means spending a lot on upgrades that you didn't need in A-Spec, sometimes totaling more than the prize money on offer. The B-Spec endurance races are also quite parsimonious, presumably to prevent us from using them as a way of getting more cash.

I still believe there should be a rewind function, especially given how easy it is to get stuck to a barrier or nerfed off course by an AI that's certainly artificial but barely worthy of being called intelligent.

Tuning is the last area I'll talk about, and I'm really surprised that GT5 is the one that I have to call out. If anything, the game offers you fewer tuning options than GT4. You certainly have less control than FM3. Tire changes are limited to compounds, with no choice of wheel size, width, or even tire pressure. Since the game doesn't tell you the weight distribution of your cars, getting the springs and dampers right becomes a measure of guesswork, and the "fully adjustable" gearbox only lets you change the final drive. This last one baffles me, since it has been a staple of the first four games.

Are these flaws enough to damn the game? On balance, no, but they are enough to stop me from crowning GT5 the king of console racers. There are hopeful signs, however. The 1.03 update added mechanical damage to online play, and I've read that work is underway to convert some of the 800 standard cars, so it's possible that these other things will get addressed too. That does mean we shouldn't hold out too much hope for other DLC though, given the glacial pace of work at PD.

Speaking of DLC, after what seemed like an interminable wait, what's almost certainly the final additional content to FM3 finally arrived. The ten car pack was the result of an series of online polls over the summer, and although you're unlikely to be psyched about all of them, there's something there for everyone: Sierra RS500s and 190Es, a Delorean, and a Volvo 242 that seems to have a huge following that seems baffling to those of us who didn't grow up in America.

Turn 10 have done a pretty good job supporting the game with DLC over the years, something I hope PD does as well. There have been reports of bugs with the new cars not colliding properly which Turn 10 say they're looking into, but after spending some time bouncing off all of them, they seem to be able to take damage pretty well. You can tell that Turn 10's attention is now elsewhere though:

The trailer for Forza Motorsport 4

The trailer for FM4 that appeared online seems to indicate that Turn 10 has spent a lot of time on its graphics engine, with interior renders that are frankly stunning. The company also makes a big deal about the fact that the game will be fully Kinect-compatible. If this amounted to the same feature that the Eye allows in GT5, that would be great, but it seems it's the same controller-free gameplay that we saw at E3. I'm utterly underwhelmed by this. I sometimes feel strange enough sitting in my living room with a steering wheel when neighbors walk by—the thought of sitting there doing the same thing with my hands with no wheel holds zero interest for me, especially since the player is only controlling the steering, with the game taking charge of accelerating and braking. Is this a way of appealing to little kids? I can't see who else would be looking forward to it.

What I am looking forward to is seeing if Polyphony can rectify the most glaring bugs in the time it takes FM4 to hit the shelves. Then we'll really have a prize fight on our hands.